Now
I feel as though I’m living inside a glass box.
I can shout as loudly as I want inside this box but no one will ever hear me.
My crying goes ignored, my screams are just a whirlpool for me to drown in.
The floor is carpeted in words, walls of letters that spill from my brain, an overflow of black ink.
All these questions I cannot ask, all these answers I will not give.
‘Do you remember what happened?’
They ask me this most days, and even though on the inside I’m burning, it hurts, it consumes, outside I remain blank.
It’s not just anguish; I have a physical reaction to this question too.
When they ask it, my throat locks and my vocal cords freeze and my brain turns to ice.
Sam comes again today and it is a relief to see him.
He has the children with him, Joe in a new jumper, dark grey with blue sleeves, quite unlike anything he’d pick for himself.
I wonder who bought it for him.
Sam’s mother probably.
Sam looks thinner than last time, and tanned, although the tree outside tells me it’s only the beginning of spring.
‘I’ve started running,’ he tells me.
Joe, who rarely speaks, says, ‘He’s even signed up for Runner’s World , Mum.
And he sits there for hours reading about compression socks.
’
I smile, just a small one, to show Joe I understand.
Smile and hold his eyes for a moment, the way Greg has taught me.
The smile is caught by Sam, who never misses anything, and the happiness in his face seems overblown for such a small thing.
‘You’re doing so well,’ he says.
‘You’re making so much improvement every day.
Greg tells me the therapy sessions are really starting to help.
’
Does he? Are they?
Can it really help, this relentless churning up of the past, the daily guided walk into the heart of my pain?
I sense the slow build of these sessions and I know, of course, where they are leading.
I know that sooner or later we will be taking a pickaxe to the door that has been closed – not just closed, but slammed shut, bolted and padlocked – for the past fifteen years.
I understand the rules of this game.
Death first, the easy one, let’s deal with that.
And so Greg talks of my mother as if he knew her, as if he knew the way her hair – still deep brown with not one streak of grey when she died – remained resolutely flattened against her scalp no matter how much she blow-dried and backcombed and bouffanted, her word.
‘I give up,’ she’d say, slinging the hairdryer across the room.
‘Helmet head it is.’
Greg doesn’t know that she was beautiful but in that careless way, grabbing a blob of moisturiser on her way out of the house, smearing it into her cheeks on the drive to work, her only concession to glamour.
She didn’t need make-up or a bouffant.
And she was always laughing, he doesn’t know that.
He can’t hear her laugh like I can, a full-bodied, head-thrown-back guffaw that was at odds with her delicate appearance.
He’s got me thinking about her, though, I’ll say that for him.
And I have learned something new.
It’s all right to let a little bit of her light back in; it doesn’t hurt as much as I’d always assumed it would.
‘You’ll be home soon, Mummy,’ says Daisy, interrupting my thoughts and leading me back to my family.
‘And we’ll make cakes and go to the beach and sail the boat and everything will be just the same.
You’ll see.’
She wraps her arms around me, my beautiful little glass-half-full girl, squeezing hard, her cobra squeeze, as if she can force her optimism into me by osmosis.